We already have theoretical designs for reaction-mass-less propulsion: the flashlight rocket - powered by photon momentum. The question is, if this can be made practical, does it have a better power-to-thrust ratio than a photon rocket?
To remove the noise, the absolute values were replaced with derivative values based on variations. This is global-warming-denier science at its finest, folks: Using a derivative operation to remove noise!
It would have helped if you'd read the entire paragraph. They were clearly using the more general meaning of derivative that they were working with values derived using some function from the original data, rather than the original data itself. That function was a time-difference of moving 12-month averages. There is a derivative involved, but it's disingenuous to claim that the function they chose wouldn't reduce noise.
The question is, does the band-pass filter improve or hinder understanding of the data; are the conclusions reached overly influenced by artifacts from the algorithm, or are they merely clarified by it. Sifting through data for meaning is hard. You can't just pick one word out of context and say "oh well, that proves the whole thing is garbage."
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Also, that it would be interesting to actually create a jpeg puzzle (monochrome, of course), with higher-order blocks than just simple gradients. Also, what would be the best distribution (vocabulary if you will) of blocks to fit certain kinds of pictures.
The "stiff upper lip" is just words. There is no facial gesture. The term was invented around the time Cricket was made the national sport as an effort to promote British Nationalism to get through some hardship or another that they were having.
Yeah, but plants have the storage problem well handled. The electricity from your vaunted sand-panels must be used immediately or it is lost. Making hydrocarbons from electricity is far more expensive than making hydrocarbons from hydrocarbons, and the transportation sector will require hydrocarbons as a storage mechanism until electrical batteries can contain the same concentration of stored energy in both weight and volume and charging speed.
Solar panels are great when you don't have to worry about weight and volume in your storage scheme. i.e. fixed locations.
We tried that with the state lottery system. It turns out that most people can't understand statistics, and if they could, we wouldn't be able to afford the schools that don't teach it.
TV is shot at 60 frames per second. Yeah, ok, they're "half-field" frames, but that's better anyway when fluid motion is more important than detail. Movies are the one that is shot at 24 fps, but they keep the shutter open longer, so you get motion blur. Graphics cards simulate motion blur by averaging a bunch of consecutive frames together. If you can't throw the frames out, you don't get the compensatory motion blur, if you can throw the frames out, why not display them directly up to the limit of the screen?
No, just my own experience. I suppose it could just be that the people responsible for the tailoring the compression aren't being as thorough as they could be: it might take six times as long to properly look over the details, time they're just not given. Possibly they're using tiny monitors with bad eyes, or worse, monitors whose resolution is less than the target resolution in scaling mode.
I really don't have a good explanation for why something with six times the data capacity as DVD, and a target output of six times the pixels, has more noticeable artifacts. Since compression is being used, quality should improve faster than storage space.
Just a observation that, so far, it's not as great as it could be.
Flash is just bad on all operating systems, not just linux. It has the advantage of doing something on a lot of different machines, but it's a braindead least-common-denominator to do it. Flash video is just bog standard other kinds of video, but because it's encapsulated in flash, it has to be decoded in flash, which only uses the CPU. Why the heck should Hulu, which isn't even SD in resolution, require "2.0 ghz Core Duo" as a minimum when better-resolution video plays just fine on an iPod.
Don't buy blu-ray at all. It's a transition format. Just enough to showcase the higher resolution screens we were trying to push (to get the digital terrestrial broadcast rollout going), but the rough edges are very visible. For instance, high-contrast regions frequently show visible fringing, and low contrast regions show blockiness on the disks I've tried so far.
Go ahead and rent, but blu-ray isn't going to be long-term for a number of reasons. In terms of picture quality, it's not like VHS where there were features that could make a huge difference (quad head, etc.). Any player should be as good as another since the outputs are all digital. But it's dumb to put your money into the media itself for the reasons we've both mentioned.
The problem with VASIMR is that it's way too complicated for what you get: an engine which varies between "inefficient, and not enough thrust to do anything with minimum thrust requirements" and "moderately efficient, with much less thrust"
If you want to get off planet, VASIMR does you no good. You need Chemical or nuclear rockets, and nuclear rockets aren't clean enough to use on a populated planet.
The problem with 3He, though, is that that the price is high, but the demand is low. Nothing about collecting it from the moon (which doesn't have much of it at all, just higher concentration than the earth's crust, which would be useful if we weren't getting the current supply from natural gas pockets....) will increase the demand for it in the near-term. Maybe in fifty or a hundred years if fusion becomes practical and just can't be done with more available isotopes, but i've got my money on "we realize that fission is more than enough for the next fifty-thousand years, so fusion research will have plenty of time to figure out how to use elements we have in abundance on the ground"
You want commercial space? Bring costs down. That's it. Getting stuff into space is so ridiculously expensive that communications companies are talking about using airships and solar-powered drones instead of satellites for many purposes.
I think it's less cynical than that. Standardization means that you can count on a feature being present on a coworker's or friend's machine, and very likely also on your next machine. It means you're not tied down to the particular arcane setup that works just right for you and no one else.
I know I'm loathe to perform a customization on my own machines (and I carefully document any nonstandard settings so I can reproduce them in the event of a re-install or upgrade), precisely because I don't want to be tied to a specific machine or software version for anything. I still do a few, because of certain annoyances, but I try to keep it to a minimum so that computers remain a commodity for me.
But that kind of thinking does tend to lead to feature advocacy: if a feature doesn't get used, then it might disappear from future versions, or simply not be present in competitors software that has other features you want, so to protect features that work for you, there is some pressure to convince enough others that they really are the "right way to do things."
And a tongue in cheek critique of the sibling post, my way really is the right way. The one true way. Every other way is wrong. And that way can be summed up as follows: Never become dependent on any feature that is present in only one tool. Ok, I don't know if it's really the one true way, but it's a pretty useful bumper-sticker (or coffee mug...) nonetheless.
Yeah, but even that's actually just a workaround because web browsers aren't properly buffering rendered pages in your history.
If you could hit the back button and instantly be back on the page you were looking at and at the same position of that page, with no reloading and reflowing to mess you up, you wouldn't need tabs to load a quick check of a link. Refresh is a single key-combo away if you need it. It shouldn't be the default. You shouldn't need tabs just to look at three or four links in the middle of a page one at a time.
Opera kinda-sorta seems to do things correctly, although I think it's just caching the page and re-rendering it every time, rather than properly trading memory for instantaneous flip-back.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's important that we avoid the appearance of impropriety. Especially if actual impropriety is occurring.
We already have theoretical designs for reaction-mass-less propulsion: the flashlight rocket - powered by photon momentum. The question is, if this can be made practical, does it have a better power-to-thrust ratio than a photon rocket?
Have you been living in a cave the past 50 years? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-27_Polaris
To remove the noise, the absolute values were replaced with derivative values based on variations.
This is global-warming-denier science at its finest, folks: Using a derivative operation to remove noise!
It would have helped if you'd read the entire paragraph. They were clearly using the more general meaning of derivative that they were working with values derived using some function from the original data, rather than the original data itself. That function was a time-difference of moving 12-month averages. There is a derivative involved, but it's disingenuous to claim that the function they chose wouldn't reduce noise.
The question is, does the band-pass filter improve or hinder understanding of the data; are the conclusions reached overly influenced by artifacts from the algorithm, or are they merely clarified by it. Sifting through data for meaning is hard. You can't just pick one word out of context and say "oh well, that proves the whole thing is garbage."
Depends on how often you play that dollar. Once per day is all your oil changes and one moderate car repair.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Also, that it would be interesting to actually create a jpeg puzzle (monochrome, of course), with higher-order blocks than just simple gradients. Also, what would be the best distribution (vocabulary if you will) of blocks to fit certain kinds of pictures.
The "stiff upper lip" is just words. There is no facial gesture. The term was invented around the time Cricket was made the national sport as an effort to promote British Nationalism to get through some hardship or another that they were having.
Hah. Well there you go. Damn it's easy to get sucked into these things.
At no point during the life of a mammal does it produce anywhere near 1 MWe.
Yeah, but plants have the storage problem well handled. The electricity from your vaunted sand-panels must be used immediately or it is lost. Making hydrocarbons from electricity is far more expensive than making hydrocarbons from hydrocarbons, and the transportation sector will require hydrocarbons as a storage mechanism until electrical batteries can contain the same concentration of stored energy in both weight and volume and charging speed.
Solar panels are great when you don't have to worry about weight and volume in your storage scheme. i.e. fixed locations.
We tried that with the state lottery system. It turns out that most people can't understand statistics, and if they could, we wouldn't be able to afford the schools that don't teach it.
TV is shot at 60 frames per second. Yeah, ok, they're "half-field" frames, but that's better anyway when fluid motion is more important than detail. Movies are the one that is shot at 24 fps, but they keep the shutter open longer, so you get motion blur. Graphics cards simulate motion blur by averaging a bunch of consecutive frames together. If you can't throw the frames out, you don't get the compensatory motion blur, if you can throw the frames out, why not display them directly up to the limit of the screen?
No, just my own experience. I suppose it could just be that the people responsible for the tailoring the compression aren't being as thorough as they could be: it might take six times as long to properly look over the details, time they're just not given. Possibly they're using tiny monitors with bad eyes, or worse, monitors whose resolution is less than the target resolution in scaling mode.
I really don't have a good explanation for why something with six times the data capacity as DVD, and a target output of six times the pixels, has more noticeable artifacts. Since compression is being used, quality should improve faster than storage space.
Just a observation that, so far, it's not as great as it could be.
Flash is just bad on all operating systems, not just linux. It has the advantage of doing something on a lot of different machines, but it's a braindead least-common-denominator to do it. Flash video is just bog standard other kinds of video, but because it's encapsulated in flash, it has to be decoded in flash, which only uses the CPU. Why the heck should Hulu, which isn't even SD in resolution, require "2.0 ghz Core Duo" as a minimum when better-resolution video plays just fine on an iPod.
Don't buy blu-ray at all. It's a transition format. Just enough to showcase the higher resolution screens we were trying to push (to get the digital terrestrial broadcast rollout going), but the rough edges are very visible. For instance, high-contrast regions frequently show visible fringing, and low contrast regions show blockiness on the disks I've tried so far.
Go ahead and rent, but blu-ray isn't going to be long-term for a number of reasons. In terms of picture quality, it's not like VHS where there were features that could make a huge difference (quad head, etc.). Any player should be as good as another since the outputs are all digital. But it's dumb to put your money into the media itself for the reasons we've both mentioned.
That's a lye!
For efficiency reasons, the programmer may have remapped the letters and numbers, swapping one or more rows.
At the $150 price point, the only thing you need to plug in to some of those blu-ray players is patch cable.
You sure about that? R?-Unit?
Apple Records or Apple Computers?
The problem with VASIMR is that it's way too complicated for what you get: an engine which varies between "inefficient, and not enough thrust to do anything with minimum thrust requirements" and "moderately efficient, with much less thrust"
If you want to get off planet, VASIMR does you no good. You need Chemical or nuclear rockets, and nuclear rockets aren't clean enough to use on a populated planet.
The problem with 3He, though, is that that the price is high, but the demand is low. Nothing about collecting it from the moon (which doesn't have much of it at all, just higher concentration than the earth's crust, which would be useful if we weren't getting the current supply from natural gas pockets....) will increase the demand for it in the near-term. Maybe in fifty or a hundred years if fusion becomes practical and just can't be done with more available isotopes, but i've got my money on "we realize that fission is more than enough for the next fifty-thousand years, so fusion research will have plenty of time to figure out how to use elements we have in abundance on the ground"
You want commercial space? Bring costs down. That's it. Getting stuff into space is so ridiculously expensive that communications companies are talking about using airships and solar-powered drones instead of satellites for many purposes.
The entire domestic recorded music market is worth less than 14 billion (that's revenue btw, not profit).
I think it's less cynical than that. Standardization means that you can count on a feature being present on a coworker's or friend's machine, and very likely also on your next machine. It means you're not tied down to the particular arcane setup that works just right for you and no one else.
I know I'm loathe to perform a customization on my own machines (and I carefully document any nonstandard settings so I can reproduce them in the event of a re-install or upgrade), precisely because I don't want to be tied to a specific machine or software version for anything. I still do a few, because of certain annoyances, but I try to keep it to a minimum so that computers remain a commodity for me.
But that kind of thinking does tend to lead to feature advocacy: if a feature doesn't get used, then it might disappear from future versions, or simply not be present in competitors software that has other features you want, so to protect features that work for you, there is some pressure to convince enough others that they really are the "right way to do things."
And a tongue in cheek critique of the sibling post, my way really is the right way. The one true way. Every other way is wrong. And that way can be summed up as follows: Never become dependent on any feature that is present in only one tool. Ok, I don't know if it's really the one true way, but it's a pretty useful bumper-sticker (or coffee mug...) nonetheless.
Yeah, but even that's actually just a workaround because web browsers aren't properly buffering rendered pages in your history.
If you could hit the back button and instantly be back on the page you were looking at and at the same position of that page, with no reloading and reflowing to mess you up, you wouldn't need tabs to load a quick check of a link. Refresh is a single key-combo away if you need it. It shouldn't be the default. You shouldn't need tabs just to look at three or four links in the middle of a page one at a time.
Opera kinda-sorta seems to do things correctly, although I think it's just caching the page and re-rendering it every time, rather than properly trading memory for instantaneous flip-back.
In the history of the world, only one man has ever ordered the use of nuclear weapons on a populated city. Guess which party he was from.